Employees working for Obamacare contractor Serco do nothing for days or weeks at a time, a whistle blower within the company told a local news station this week.

The employees want to work but there's not enough work to go around, the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told St. Louis, Missouri's News 4 KMOV.

The employee alleged that Serco is keeping its workforce unnecessarily high to get more money out of the federal government.

'They want to hire more people, even though we still don't have work to keep the people that we have busy,' the employee said.

With paper applications on the decline after healthcare.gov began working more frequently, a whistle blower says said data entry personnel at Obamacare contractor Serco were only expected to enter two paper applications a month, 'and some people are not even able to do that.'

Serco Inc. is a subsidiary of international company Serco Group Pls. The U.S. branch of the company employs about 8,000 people in 45 states.

The company has a 12-year $1.25 billion contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to process paper Obamacare applications made through the federal exchanges.

In testimony to Congress last fall, the company's programs manager Jon Lau indicated that a quarter, 2,000, of Serco's U.S. employees handle Obamacare applications.

Hundreds of them sit around all day doing nothing, however, the whistle blower told KMOV,

'There a weeks that a data entry person would not process an application,' the employee said.

Serco has three facilities that process Obamacare applications in Missouri, Kentucky and Oklahoma. Employees who do data entry at those facilities 'have hardly any work to do,' the whistle blower said.

'They're told to sit at their computers and hit the refresh button every 10 minutes - no more than every 10 minutes. They're monitored - to hopefully look for an application.'

With paper applications on the decline after healthcare.gov began working more frequently, the employee said data entry personnel were only expected to enter two applications a month, 'and some people are not even able to do that.'

After it began looking into the initial whistle blower's claims, KMOV
said it found even more employees who were willing to attest to claims.

It also found a post online from someone claiming to be a former Serco employee who said the company 'is a joke.'

'There
is nothing to do - NO WORK!' General Clerk II wrote in a message board
on April 16. The subject line of his comment was 'DO NOT WORK FOR THIS
PLACE!!!!!'

Serco program director John Lau (right) testified to Congress in October that 2,000 of his company's employees have access to consumers'
information collected by the Obamacare website

'We need to look carefully into this structure from top to bottom,' Missouri Senator Roy Blunt told KMOV after it alerted him to the allegations.

'But a call center, where somebody's goal is to sign up one or two people in the course of a significant period or time, how could that possibly be reasonable?' Blunt wondered.

The first health care open enrollment period technically ended in March, but it was extended by the federal government to mid-April for people having problems with the website. Only certain groups of people such as young people aging off their parents' health insurance can enroll for Obamacare at this time.

The next open enrollment period does not being until the middle of November. The government expects repairs to healthcare.gov to be finished by that time, which will likely reduce the frequency of paper applications even further.

The employee alleged that Serco isn't firing employees it doesn't need because the more people it has working on the project, the more money it gets from the government.

'So they want us there, even if we're not doing anything.'

Serco declined to comment to KMOV for the story.

It's website describes it as 'a values-led company and our culture and ethos are at the
heart of everything we do.'

'Our
approach has made us one of the world's leading service companies and
our vision is to be the world's greatest,' the company's about page says.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services - HHS agency overseeing the federal health exchanges - told KMOV that, 'Serco is committed to making sure federal funds are spent appropriately, and the number of Serco staff is reviewed on a regular basis,' KMOV says.

Serco's UK parent company is one of the leading contractors with Great Britain's government.

In 2012, the company admitted to the National Health Service that it
lied 252 times over a six month period about the performance of out of
hours doctors.

It is currently under investigation in the UK by the Serious Fraud Office for charging the Ministry of Justice to electronically tag criminals that were in jail or dead.

The company has already agreed to repay the govenment nearly £70 million for the falsified work related to the tagging scheme, BBC reports, and it could end up paying more.

Serco's behavior in Great Britian was so crooked that it was tporarially banned from competing for government contracts in that country. The ban was lifted in February and Serco is now contracting with the governmnet again.

When approached about Serco's terrible track record abroad last summer, a spokesman for CMS told Reuters, Serco is a highly skilled company that has a proven track record in
providing cost-effective services to numerous other federal
agencies.'